Monday, April 13, 2009

PASSING GASS: A RANT FOR AMERICA

"Our culture...desires men who will be willing to be mowed down in anonymous rows if need be, used up in families in farms and factories, thrown away on the streets of sprawling towns, who want to pass through existence so cleanly no trace of them will ever be found." --William H. Gass, Habitations of the WordAmerican society does indeed desire and shape people "who want to pass through existence so cleanly no trace of them will ever be found." These are exactly the Americans to whom politicians pander and whom they implicitly insult by characterizing them with long strings of cliches: they are 'ordinary Americans' who 'play by the rules,' who 'work hard' and 'do everything right.' They are the docile subjects the system creates to perpetuate itself. But reality is more complex and surprising than any ideological model. People can and do rebel, and when they do so in significant numbers, the system is forced to alter itself. This is very far from revolution, though, and the problem Gass identifies remains rampant in America. The extraordinary pressure to be unexceptional, applied most effectively by and among peer groups in the early grades of our public schools, is an awesome and rarely discussed force in American life. And it's little discussed, I imagine, because it's a side effect of one of the brightest aspects of American culture: representative democracy. A generous and originally radical levelling instinct, the idea that "all men are created equal," has been perverted into an antipathy toward those who display intellectual superiority. Intellectuals are 'book smart' (a phrase always spoken sneeringly), while Sarah Palin's 'real Americans' are 'street smart,' a distinction that implies the latter group acquired its knowledge more naturally, through experience, rather than through the unnatural and probably unAmerican activity of reading books. (The distinction is bogus and won't withstand the slightest amount of real thought-pressure. Anyone who doesn't consider reading an 'experience' has never read well.) Demonstrations of obvious intellectual superiority in an American context will often provoke belligerent or resentful comments such as "You think you're better than me?" The best reply to this would be, "I think I think better than you, which is not exactly the same thing." Rejoinders rarely work, however, when interlocutors are excessively proud of their thickness. The best conversation to have with such people is none.On the other hand, just as there's much truth in Gass's remark, it conceals the more diverse reality of American society as a place where the overwhelming pressure to conform and be unexceptional tends to force the exceptional to the margins, where they find a (perhaps dubious because marginal) measure of freedom. The pressure to paint oneself in one of the many shades of corporate bland (The corporate world is like a Baskin Robbins with 32 flavors, all vanilla.) can be figured as an enormous leather loafer (a jackboot would be far too gauche for the smiley-faced corporate fascism of our time) bearing down on a flat steel plate that represents the various disciplinary structures of our society (from cradle to classroom to cubicle to coffin--the alliterative through-line of the American Corporate Dream; its resemblance to a nightmare is one of the great unthinkables of the American Now). Almost all of the soft human clay underneath the steel receives the impression of its flatness with minimal resistance. But a few harder clumps of earth, a number of pebbles, some irritatingly persistent weeds will be squeezed out along the edges of the plate, thus arriving by conformist pressure at a position--the margin--from which the mechanism of conformity can be seen entire: corporate foot, societal steel, human clay. Thus does conformity, by a mechanism that woiuld leave Hegel and Marx unsurprised, create nonconformity. This is not a too-clever linguistic game or an essay in moldy dialectical dogma, but a recognition that the same force that turns the mass of men and women toward lives of corporate desperation also creates a minority resistance to itself.(A brief autobiographical aside. I feel the truth of these ideas in my own life. My experience of the repellent force of corporate conformism predated my readings in Chomsky, Zinn, Marxism, anarchism, etc. Corporatism repelled me first, then I began transforming my mind into a site of resistance [if such rhetoric isn't too delusionally grand, as it almost certainly is]).The nearly insurmountable problem with marginal resistance lies in its marginality. (Now's the time to say, "Duh!") Anything on the margins of society can be labeled crazy and easily dismissed, labeled criminal and easily silenced, labeled inconsequential and effortlessly ignored. Isolated, alienated, often mutally antagonistic even to the point of violence, genuine outsiders are difficult to romanticize--like the dingy, smelly reality of poverty, something the marginalized know all too well. Powerlessness comes with the territory and is sucked from the mother's breast, so it's extremely difficult for those on the edges to see their position as in any way 'privileged,' to appreciate that they are in a position to see how America really works--a much better position than, say, a bond salesman for Merrill Lynch or anyone else who has become the hegemonic ideology, an embodiment of corporate capitalism, one of the pure products of America who need never go crazy because he has plugged himself into the general madness of the 'new normal.' From outside the structure, its mind-killing madness is obvious; from inside, those on the outside can only be seen, if at all, as targets of exploitation (recall the Enron Tapes, a fleeting glimpse into the uncensored corporate mind that received far too little airplay a few years back). The corporate mind is technocratic and inhuman. Its only morality is the maximization of profit. As the authors/filmmakers of The Corporation argued compellingly, the corporate mind is psychopathic, and we are thus an entire world in the grip of a psychopathy (or several distinct psychopathies: corporatism, religious fanaticism, totalitarianism). And as Marshall Berman reminds us, in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, capitalism is essentially nihilistic, and the nihilism of the powerless is nothing compared to that of the powerful. A fact that must be remembered whenever we hear a representative of power calling anyone else a 'nihilist.'Let's wrap this up by thinking for a minute about this nihilism. Corporate nihilism, capitalist nihilism, American nihilism, the terrible, tragic darkness at the center of our national life, a darkness we've now exported to the world under the name of globalization. It's the spirit that informs the best and darkest of American literature, from Melville to Cormac McCarthy. The meaninglessness, the nothingness, the terror that arise from a consciousness of the nothingness at the center of American life. This is the true emptiness in our lives. It's an ontological hole, not a God-shaped theological one. It's an aspect of our being, not our thoughts. The self formed under capitalism bears an emptiness at the core, a void over which we perform our selves, an essential meaninglessness identical perhaps to the absence of essence that's the starting point of Sartre's existentialism. (Of course it's not really a ''blank slate" upon which the culture writes. A significant amount of what we are may be inherited, but this is mostly basic stuff common to all members of the species (the cultural universals) or is in the nature of tendencies rather than imperatives.) Our emptiness is ontological, not theological, so religion can't cure it. Religion is only another time-honored way of stuffing the void with garbage. So-called 'popular' culture is a more modern method of arriving at the same shit-soiled end.That said, Little Richard still kicks ass.

ABOUT THE TITLE

The title of this blog was shamelessly stolen by the blogger (Mea culpa! Mea culpa! Me a culprit!) from a very good volume of literary criticism, Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, edited by George Levine and David Leverenz. (Little, Brown, 1976). As all true Pynchonians know, TP's working title for Gravity's Rainbow was Mindless Pleasures.

MY TOP SHELF: BEST OF THE BEST NOVELS

ULYSSES by James Joyce

THE TRIAL by Franz Kafka

TRISTRAM SHANDY by Laurence Sterne

THE MASTER AND MARGARITA by Mikhail Bulgakov

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

MOBY DICK by Herman Melville

IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME by Marcel Proust

ABSALOM, ABSALOM! by William Faulkner

WAR AND PEACE by Leo Tolstoy

SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION by Gustave Flaubert

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov

BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy

THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING by Milan Kundera

THE GHOST WRITER by Philip Roth

AUSTERLITZ by W. G. Sebald

THE SATANIC VERSES by Salman Rushdie

AGAINST THE DAY by Thomas Pynchon

SOME GREAT BOOKS MOST PEOPLE HAVEN'T READ

A COOL MILLION by Nathanael West

AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS by Leonard Cohen

CAMERA LUCIDA by Roland Barthes

CENTURY OF THE WIND by Eduardo Galeano

DOWNRIVER by Iain Sinclair

FADO ALEXANDRINO by Antonio Lobo Antunes

HUNGER by Knut Hamsun

INVISIBLE CITIES by Italo Calvino

JACQUES THE FATALIST by Denis Diderot

L'ASSOMMOIR by Emile Zola

MAN IN THE HOLOCENE by Max Frisch

ON THE YARD by Malcolm Braly

POEMS OF PAUL CELAN (trans. by Michael Hamburger)

PUDD'NHEAD WILSON by Mark Twain

SELECTED ESSAYS by John Berger

THE ASPERN PAPERS by Henry James

THE ATLAS by William T. Vollmann

THE BEAUTIFUL ROOM IS EMPTY by Edmund White

THE BOOK OF DISQUIET by Fernando Pessoa

THE LOSER by Thomas Bernhard

FAVORITE POETS

Ovid

Dante

Shakespeare

John Donne

John Milton

William Blake

William Wordsworth

J. C. F. Holderlin

Percy Bysshe Shelley

John Keats

Walt Whitman

Emily Dickinson

Charles Baudelaire

Gerard Manley Hopkins

W. B. Yeats

Rainer Maria Rilke

T. S. Eliot

D. H. Lawrence

Guillaume Apollinaire

William Carlos Williams

Hart Crane

Wallace Stevens

W. H. Auden

Dylan Thomas

Allen Ginsberg

James Dickey

Philip Larkin

Robert Lowell

Anne Sexton

Pablo Neruda

Paul Celan

Seamus Heaney

Richard Howard

John Ashbery

SOME FAVORITE NONFICTION BOOKS

A HISTORY OF NARRATIVE FILM by David A. Cook

A LIFE OF PICASSO by John Richardson

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Howard Zinn

AGAINST INTERPRETATION by Susan Sontag

BASIC WRITINGS ON POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM by Edward Said

DISPATCHES by Michael Herr

EXISTENTIALISM FROM DOSTOYEVSKY TO SARTRE edited by Walter Kaufmann

FICTION AND THE FIGURES OF LIFE by William H. Gass

FOOTSTEPS: ADVENTURES OF A ROMANTIC BIOGRAPHER by Richard Holmes

IMPRESSIONISM: ART, LEISURE AND PARISIAN SOCIETY by Robert L. Herbert

INWARDNESS AND EXISTENCE by Walter A. Davis

LIGHTS OUT FOR THE TERRITORY by Iain Sinclair

MANUFACTURING CONSENT by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman

OUT OF SHEER RAGE: WRESTLING WITH D.H. LAWRENCE by Geoff Dyer

POSTWAR: A HISTORY OF EUROPE SINCE 1945 by Tony Judt

REMBRANDT'S EYES by Simon Schama

SEXUAL PERSONAE by Camille Paglia

STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE by D.H. Lawrence

THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE by Harold Bloom

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE by Edward Gibbon

THE GAY SCIENCE by Friedrich Nietzsche

THE GOD DELUSION by Richard Dawkins

THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY by Paul Fussell

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS by Sigmund Freud

THE RENAISSANCE by Walter Pater

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE by Naomi Klein

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW by Robert Hughes

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann